XCOM: Terror from the Breach
by Of Questionable Veracity
Summary: If XCOM existed when the Breach opened, how might that have happened? Probably differently to how I picture it, I can but try. Playing pretty fast and loose with which version of XCOM this actually follows on from, but in broad strokes assume the invasion happened and was defeated. I'll see if I can do XCOM justice, I guess.
1. Chapter 1

When I was a kid, whenever I'd feel small or lonely I'd look up at the stars. Wondered if there was life up there. There was.

It was tough. There were casualties. Lots of good men and women losing their lives, but we won. We pushed them off our planet. We ripped their secrets from their cold dead hands and turned their inventions back against them. They told us it had been a test. Turned out we were better than they'd expected.

And we weren't going to get complacent. We weren't going to assume just because we'd won we were safe. We dusted ourselves off, repaired and rebuilt and readied ourselves for anything that might follow. We looked up at the skies cautiously now, knowing what was out there, what might come again. We were looking in the wrong direction.

When alien life entered our world again it was from deep beneath the Pacific Ocean. A fissure between two tectonic plates. A portal between dimensions. The Breach. I was fifteen when the first Kaiju made land in San Francisco.

Ever since the invasion ended, all the new technology that had sprung up from it had been put away. Elerium was finite now, and the world didn't need weapons like that anymore. We thought. By the time tanks, jets and missiles took it down six days and thirty-five miles later three cities were destroyed and we understood that we needed them again. We shouldn't have hesitated.

Tens of thousands of lives were lost. Cities that had only just recovered were now in ruins once more. We mourned our dead, memorialised the attack and planned for the next one. The appearances made by giant monsters are not a coincidence, and weren't going to be so foolish enough as to think otherwise.

Only six months later, the second attack hit Manila. We were ready. Fusion Ball launchers and Plasma Beams put it down quickly, although not quietly. Two attacks is a pattern. By the time the third one hit Cabo XCOM was already being reinstated, just when everyone thought they'd finally be settling into a well-deserved retirement from fighting the extraterrestrial.

And then the fourth. If it hadn't already been obvious to everyone, this proved it. This was just the beginning. This was a planned, calculated assault. This was deliberate. And while we were stopping them now, we all knew that we couldn't rest on our laurels forever.

We couldn't keep relying on the old weapons of an old war. Old weapons we were running out of. Old weapons we couldn't replace. Every Fusion Ball fired, every flight taken in an Avenger or a Firestorm was one less, with no way of ever getting it back. No-one was stupid enough to think the attacks would just stop. We needed a new weapon, for a new war.

The world came together just like it had done before, pooling its resources and throwing aside old rivalries once more for the sake of the greater good. To fight monsters, we would create monsters of our own. The Jaeger program was born. Hunters made for a very specific kind of prey.

We tore apart the Kaiju just as we'd torn apart the invaders who came before them. We learnt what made them tick. We learnt how they were made, and we took that knowledge for ourselves. Slowly, tentatively, we built our own. Working under pressure was nothing new to us, and our confidence was enough to overcome and push through what mistakes and missteps we made.

It didn't take us long to finish the first. Our new weapon, our own monster. It worked too. More crude than the craft-mounted weapons, less practical. But still effective. And always improving. Refinements, iterations on iterations. It never pays to stand still, this we knew.

But defence is not enough. Defence won't make the attacks stop. The Breach remains open to them and closed to us. Whoever – whatever – is making and sending these living weapons to our world is beyond our reach. For now. Now we have the weapons to fight the new war, we are working on the way to end it. Every day brings it a little closer. Each fresh attack, each upgraded Kaiju, only serves to remind us of what we need to do.

We won't be stopped. They'll find out. We're the ones who push back.


	2. Chapter 2

You would think that an attack with a single, known point of entry would be considerably easier to handle than a space-borne invasion with aggressor able and willing to swoop in anywhere they want, anytime they want. You would think so, but you would be wrong.

We knew where the Breach was, yes, but that did not turn out to be helpful. Knowing where an inter-dimensional rift in the very fabric of space and time is located is no use to anyone if you cannot work out a way to actually interact with it. This we found out very quickly.

First things first we needed to try and get some understanding of what it actually was. Initial impressions were sketchy and deeper analysis and sensor-sweeps only gave us a bunch of anomalous, unusual energy readings that didn't really tell us anything we could use. Eventually though we figured out what it was. Roughly. A wormhole, from us here to there – 'there' in this case being somewhere we had no idea about.

Our first attempts at actually probing the Breach and trying to send something through were all failures. Everything was destroyed the instant it made contact. So then we tried blowing up the Breach, because why not? It seemed worth a shot. That also did not work – whatever the Breach was made of turned out to be indestructible, at least by any means we had. We didn't really linger on this option, as we felt it would simply be doing more harm than good and it may have gone badly wrong for us anyway. Best to be cautious, we felt.

Besides, is a portal really made of anything, really? This is why I'm not in the science division, I suppose.

So we tried to contain the Breach. We dumped a whole lot of rocks and debris on it, tried to bury it. Didn't work. We built a coffin around it, all sheet-steel and reinforced concrete – Chernobyl style. Did not work. We tried another coffin, this time with Alloy in it. Also didn't work. Whenever there was a Breach event the thing just destroyed whatever we'd put around it.

In the end we just tried to make the best of the situation we were given. We deployed sensor-buoys and listening posts and autonomous sweeper-drones around the Breach, monitored it directly, brought in people to try and work out if there was any pattern to the events when it opened – basically we kept a very, very close eye on it. Anytime anything came out we killed it. Or we tried to, at least. Turned out even three-hundred foot, eight-thousand ton monsters could disappear in the ocean if they really wanted to.

Most got spotted right off. We noticed the Breach opening, we tagged them as they left, we followed them and we killed them. Those were the good days. Every so often though one slipped the net. Maybe they learnt where the buoys were, maybe they got lucky – it didn't matter. Here and there one would simply vanish only to pop up miles away, ready to clamber up onto land and start making problems for the nice, ordinary people going about their day.

At that point there were a few who wanted to start building walls.

Those people had always been there, really, but back when we were winning no-one paid them any attention. The idea of actually trying to build coastline-spanning walls was laughable. Three-hundred foot plus for however many miles? How much material would that need? Do you go entirely around or only what might be considered 'at risk' places? Who decides that? What was to stop a Kaiju just climbing over it? Or going through it? It was patently absurd. Besides, walls don't kill things, and dead things cause fewer problems.

No. Jaegers might be a bit ridiculous but they really were the best approach. The only solution, in fact. Once the novelty of having our very own giant monsters wore off they just became another piece of equipment like anything else. A solution to a problem, a weapon in our arsenal. It really came down to the quality of pilots at the end of the day anyway, like it always did, and the quality of the teams supporting them. As an organisation we got very, very good at monster slaying.

Of course, we haven't even touched on the part where things started to go really wrong. Some people probably would have felt better hiding at that point.


	3. Chapter 3

You never know you're going to have a bad day until it starts happening. You can have a bad feeling, sure, but you never know how badly everything is going to go until the dust has settled and you have a chance to look back and take stock. They always start out and everything always goes perfectly normally up until it stops and goes horribly, horribly wrong. The day everything went South was like that.

Me and Yancy had signed up at the same time, the first moment we could. Of course, we didn't know then that we were joining the very definitely final phase of the war. When word came back from Mars we'd both just finished being screened by Psi. I scored enough; workable but nothing spectacular. Yancy got one of the highest ratings they'd ever seen. That was why Yancy got to be a pilot, and I just got retained. He never did let me forget that.

So while me and the rest of the grunts hung around with our thumbs up our collective arses Yancy and the other pilots were the ones who got sent out to actually do work. Rumour was they'd be getting rid of the rest of us sooner rather than later. No need for us anymore.

X-Com is cautious by nature (some might unkindly say 'paranoid') but given how things were going it seemed pilots were all we needed. New candidates were always welcome if they registered high enough in psi testing but everyone else turned away; those of us there already were kept on just 'in case'. Until it was decided we were surplus to requirements though they seemed plenty content to keep me on just to keep rubbing my brother's success in my face.

Don't get me wrong, I loved my brother and no-one could be more proud of him than me. I would just never tell him that. Sibling rivalry and all that. Even if he could bend titanic bio-organic battle-machines to his will I could still beat him in a fight if I needed to, he thought he could hold his drink better and I needed to be there to remind him he couldn't, stuff like that. But no, I was proud of him. Never will get a chance to tell him any of this of course, not now. But we'll get to that.

This one day, this one bad day, the call came in. A Kaiju had slipped The Net – 'The Net' being the vague term for all the stuff we put in the water to track the things, naturally – and popped up just off the coast of Alaska. It was a Category Three. The biggest we'd seen up until that point, in fact. Named 'Knifehead' once we'd got a proper look at it breaking the water. From its speed and direction it was obvious that Anchorage was the target, so Yancy was jumped into Orion and got sent off to the Miracle Mile – we'd spotted Knifehead too late for anything else.

Side note: we still to this day have no idea how a Kaiju navigates and even less idea how they seemed to know how to get to the nearest population centre by the most direct route. Jaeger navigate because we put radar and GPS into them, but no matter how often we've dug around inside a Kaiju we've never found anything that might answer this. Just one of those things, I guess.

Yancy makes contact with Knifehead just after the daft bastard takes a detour to rescue a boat that just happened to be the AO. Damn Kaiju figures it's a great opportunity to sneak up from behind – and it's still pretty scary how easy it is for one of these things to sneak – and tries to take out Orion while it's back is turned. Yancy wasn't falling for that.

We're all back in the LOCCENT when this happens of course. We had a drone in the area for visual contact but it was raining and no-one could really see shit. So all we had was Yancy telling us what was happening, the readouts and viewpoint from Orion and a real distant satellite view. That's not good for the blood pressure, let me tell you.

The viewpoint is the worst part. Lot of bubbles and waves and water and angry, toothy alien faces. It must make sense to the pilots given they manage to do their jobs but it always looked like a clusterfuck to me.

Close as we could make out Knifehead came at him strong, trying to impale him (as you'd expect) only to get that big spearpoint of a skull blunted when Yancy sliced away maybe half of it. If he'd gone further he probably would have taken the thing's head clean off. Orion had Alloy claws, see; superheated to try and limit Kaiju Blue exposure. Those things will go through damn-near anything.

Knifehead was a bit more cautious after that. Tried swimming around but Yancy was tight on it the whole time, grabbed it by the tail and pulled it down and grappled it underneath a pretty significant iceberg. Whenever Yancy got involved in a wrestling match with a Kaiju I always broke out in hives. I'd heard of – and seen – other pilots going for the clean kill and always wished he'd do the same, but he had his technique and it involved a lot of rolling around, clawing, ripping and gutting.

That was what happened to Knifehead. It bit a few bit chunks out of Orin but ended up losing an arm as pretty much the whole right-hand side of its body was torn away and after that most of the fight went out of it, along with its intestines. Yancy was reprimanded for an unnecessarily harmful kill – that's a lot of Blue he spilled – but it was still a kill.

The boat was fine, by the way.

It was at that point someone felt it was a good idea to mention to Yancy that they'd been tracking an unidentified object moving towards his position. They had reasons for waiting to tell him of course: it had been too far away initially to be mission-critical, it did not fit the signature of Kaiju movement and there hadn't been another Breach event anyway, things like that. But that had been before. While the fight had been going on the thing – whatever it was – had managed to close the distance.

They had first picked it up somewhere on the East-Coast. By the time the fight was over it had reached Alaska. Nothing moved like that, at least nothing we knew about at the time. First they just thought it was some bug or radar glitch, but it wasn't. It was real, whatever it was, and it was coming straight at Yancy. Nothing that does that is ever friendly.

This thing came out of nowhere. Yancy tried to meet it halfway but he didn't even get close. He was still coming out from under the iceberg when it blew him to pieces. The first hit crippled Orion, took a big chunk out of its lower body. Yancy was still going but the left leg came away and neural feedback slowed him down enough for the next salvo to hit Orion in the head. The head disappeared.

It was the old war all over again. Some weapon we had no idea about, power we couldn't even imagine. The sort of firepower you'd need to kill a Jaeger? Decapitate it? Underwater? With one hit? A Kaiju could do it take off a Jaeger's head, if you were careless. But a Kaiju had to grab your Jaeger by the face and pull. This thing had shot it off and it hadn't even been in visual range.

Yancy was not dead at this point. A pilot's pod is not in the head of a Jaeger, because heads are easy targets. It's on the underside of the spine. Losing the head is still an instant-failure condition however, because then you're fighting half-blind. Yancy wasn't going to be doing any good and he knew. He hit eject and his pod was away, but it didn't make it. We had him one second, then he was gone the next. It happened so quick it took me a few seconds to actually twig it had happened at all. Hell, it took everyone there a few seconds.

I don't remember much after that. Shock, probably. We lost the bogey not long afterwards, apparently. I don't know where. They sent a crew and another two Jaegers to sweep the area but all we found was what was left of Knifehead and the blitzed corpse of Orion. Never seen damage like it, they said.

Found the pod, eventually. Even found most of Yancy.

At the time I was upset – to put it mildly – but not so upset I didn't forget that whoever or whatever was responsible for this was still out there. Either the ones running the Kaiju stepped up their game or our previous visitors left something we didn't notice. Or maybe they were something else entirely. It didn't matter. We were X-Com. None of us were going to stop until there wasn't a single alien of left breathing, this side of the Breach and maybe the other side too. If we felt up to it.

And this is the part where I come in.


End file.
